A judge this week sharply reduced the punitive damages a Boulder jury had exacted against prison company executive Thomas Wierdsma for his role in a felony domestic abuse case involving his son and former daughter-in-law.

Boulder District Judge Judith LaBuda ruled Monday that she was forced by state law to reduce the award -- from $150,000 to $6,000 -- despite the civil court jury's finding in July that Wierdsma, a senior vice president for the GEO Group, had engaged in "extreme and outrageous" conduct when he attempted to shield his son from abuse allegations made by his daughter-in-law, Beatrix Szeremi.

State law, the judge wrote, stipulates that punitive damages "shall not exceed an amount which is equal to the amount of the actual damages awarded to the injured party." In the case against Weirdsma and his son, Charles Wierdsma, the jury found actual damages in the amount of $6,000.

Szeremi said she was devastated by LaBuda's ruling because it essentially nullified the message that the jury was trying to get across with the punitive portion of its verdict -- that people in powerful positions need to be held accountable for their actions.

"This decision says it's OK that people who have power and money can get away with everything," she said Tuesday. "The whole thing is just totally wrong."

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Attempts to reach Thomas Weirdsma via emails to GEO Group's Florida headquarters and through his Denver attorney, Michael Knauf, were unsuccessful Tuesday. Knauf declined to comment about the ruling.

'Justice was aborted'

Emails and text messages entered as evidence in the civil trial against father and son showed that the older Weirdsma repeatedly intimidated Szeremi after she called police on his son following more than a year of physical abuse. According to court records, Szeremi suffered multiple drunken beatings, a near drowning in a bathtub and an attempted suffocation with a pillow at the hands of her husband.

Charles Wierdsma

Thomas Weirdsma first told Szeremi, who is Hungarian born but a legal U.S. resident, that he would be evicting her from the Boulder home he owned. When she didn't move out, he said he would be informing immigration authorities about her.

GEO is one of the largest private prison companies in the world -- with $1.6 billion in revenues and 20,000 employees across 115 facilities -- and the company operates several immigration detention facilities for the federal government, including one in Aurora.

Szeremi's Boulder attorney, John Pineau, said Tuesday that "justice was aborted" as the result of this week's ruling.

He blamed tort reform efforts from years past.

"A Boulder jury decided that this guy needs to be hammered with a $150,000 punitive judgment, but the law has been twisted by corporate interests and insurance companies so that you end up with less than 10 percent of what the jury thought was just," Pineau said. "The statutes have protected the defendants, who in this case were found to have acted outrageously towards the victim of a felony crime."

The jury hit Charles Wierdsma with $1 million in actual damages and $50,000 in punitive damages. That verdict is on appeal. Last fall, he pleaded guilty to a single felony count of second-degree assault against his former wife and was sentenced to two years of probation and 60 days in jail.

'Must be commensurate'

Former Boulder County prosecutor Trip DeMuth said there is no doubt that the jurors in the Wierdsmas' civil trial "were very upset about (the defendants') conduct." But when it comes to obtaining justice, he said, the punishment "must be commensurate to the actual damages suffered."

"It's reasonable to expect a correlation between the amount of punitive damages someone can win and the amount of actual damages someone suffered in a case," DeMuth said.

Pineau said he would appeal the ruling to the Colorado Court of Appeals. In the meantime, he said he is prepared to cooperate with the Boulder County District Attorney's Office on whether there is enough evidence to pursue a case of criminal witness tampering against Thomas Wierdsma.

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